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Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Why Can't We Have Gun Control?

A lot of people are asking this. People in and out of the U.S. Those who aren't railing against the idea of gun control, that is.

I'm for gun control, or bullet control, as they do in Switzerland, but I also believe that guns or their availability aren't the root of the problem. Toxic masculinity, capitalism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry, white supremacy - these are the real problems.

At the same time, if someone has a problem controlling their behavior when it comes to a certain object, even if the object itself isn't the root of the problem, you take that object away until they can get their shit together. Especially if they're using that object to slaughter many hundreds of people every year.

You can't just focus on short term solutions, ignoring the long term. But when people are dying, you also need short term solutions. We do need gun control until we can figure out how to raise our children right and eliminate all that hate and violence from our culture. Because people are dying now.

So why can't we have gun control in the United States? Is it because of the 2nd Amendment?

No. It's because the arms industry owns this country. It's kind of scary, actually, how little this is talked about. There is absolutely a global arms industry that makes so many billions of dollars, it makes Microsoft look like a failing local convenience store. And it's so deeply ingrained in the U.S. that it's hard to know if it can exist apart from it.

This is why our military budget is huge to the point that we're spending money on military planes and tanks and shit we don't even need. The NRA is the local face of the arms industry, and thought that, the arms industry has bought many of our top politicians.

So what does that mean?

I think it might mean that we can have gun control in this country when we tear down the entire federal government and build back up again from scratch. But even then, no guarantees.

This is not to say that people shouldn't fight for gun control, because maybe I'm wrong, and preventing people from being randomly (or not so randomly) slaughtered is a good cause, no doubt about it. But if you want to know why it's so hard, look into the real funding sources of the NRA. And prepare for the toughest fight ever.